Background report, originally published by bdnews24.com on 19 May 2025. These restrictions remain part of the context for Benapole’s lower trade volumes.
India barred several Bangladeshi goods, including fruit drinks, bakery items, snacks, plastic products and wooden furniture, from entering through land customs stations in Assam, Meghalaya, Tripura, Mizoram and West Bengal’s Changrabandha and Fulbari. A separate directive limited readymade garment imports from Bangladesh to the Kolkata and Mumbai seaports.
bdnews24.com reported that 36 garment trucks were stuck at Benapole and 17 PRAN trucks at Burimari. A Benapole-to-Kolkata garment consignment that took three days by road and cost about Tk 600,000 could take up to eight times longer and cost nearly twice as much by the new routes. Citing India’s GTRI, Indian media estimated that $770 million of Bangladeshi exports could be affected.
Then commerce adviser Sheikh Bashir Uddin said Bangladesh would raise the issue with Indian authorities.
Source
- bdnews24.com: “How will India’s new import restrictions impact Bangladesh’s exports?” (19 May 2025)
File photo: A street (undated file photo from Benapole). Photo: Diego Tirira from Quito, Ecuador / CC BY-SA 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons
This article is a summary prepared by Maritime News BD from the report(s) listed above; it was not independently reported by Maritime News BD.
